iPhone sales have driven Apple to its biggest quarter yet, reporting revenues of $78.4 billion with over 78 million iPhones sold in the holiday season. Of the $78.4 billion, the iphone accounted for more than $54 billion thanks to the larger model, the iPhone 7 plus whose margins are larger and was on high demand.
“We’re thrilled to report that our holiday quarter results generated Apple’s highest quarterly revenue ever, and broke multiple records along the way. We sold more iPhones than ever before and set all-time revenue records for iPhone, Services, Mac, and Apple Watch,” said CEO Tim Cook.
All attributes shouldn’t only flow the iPhone way, services which include Apple Music, the App store, iCloud and Apple pay also grew strongly accounting for $7.17 billion making it the fastest growing Apple segment. The Apple watch is also reported to have outperformed its previous quarters.
However, it wasn’t all rosy at Cupertino with iPad sales heading south YoY by around 20% though optimism is high from Apple’s side, especially with newer iPad models, the iPad Pro. The iPhone maker cited high customer satisfaction with the said iPads.
Overall Apple took in a profit of $17.8 Billion on $78.4 Billion revenue. Sales in China continued to be sluggish with fierce competition from local rivals like Lenovo, Oppo, Vivo, Huawei among others. It should be noted that China was once Apple’s biggest market but now Apple is looking for alternatives like India, though that particular country has a low average selling price for smartphones since many Indians buy budget smartphones and this is not iPhone territory. The average selling price for an iPhone now stands at $695.
The iPhone 7 launched but not without criticism especially with the surprise omission of the much loved 3.5mm headphone jack in favor of a single lightning port and employment of a design language not far from the prior years models (read iPhone 6S), except the dual camera setup on the larger iPhone 7 plus and also an increment of storage for the base model which now stands at 32GB. All that drew criticism didn’t deter the iPhone from selling in droves as reflected in the earnings call.
